They are sort of ugly all right.

What freaks me out, it wouldn’t take much of a mechanical failure for those things to drop like a rock. I’m always a little amazed when I see video the top part of the rotor assembly as it speeds up. I was curious about the numbers, looked it up, the Russian Mi-26 weighs 62,000 pounds and can lift 40,000 pounds. So there is 100,000 pounds suspended from that rotor assembly.

But all of them support a lot of weight relative to the size of the hardware. Obviously it works, at least until it doesn’t.

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1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K